In the words of Hervé Dammann, Executive Vice-President, Land and Air Systems, Thales Group.
We began our discussion with a focus on Thales announcements during the Airspace World event. Although there were many, we focused on two specifically.
Surveillance
The first being Thales’ unveiling its new multi-mission primary surveillance radar, the TRAC SIGMA with simultaneous capacity for approach and long-range air surveillance for both civil and military air traffic control (ATC). The investment demonstrates the continuous investment in sensor platforms within the air traffic management (ATM) domain. With increasing air traffic, the focus on ATC efficiency couldn’t be higher.
The new L-Band radar is able to discriminate small targets with precision at an extended range (300km), helping ensure the 3NM distance separation over the entire airspace, while also ensuring approach surveillance. The solution can be used by both civilian and military ATC organisations and two stations are able to share one radar. The outcome being reduced costs and infrastructure with increased efficiency and situational awareness. This innovation allows more traffic to be supported with lower radar infrastructure requirements.
Sustainability
The second announcement we discussed was the deployment of the Thales Green Flag Orchestrator tool at DSNA in Brest, France. This end-to-end solution supports ATC and airlines including avionics. Using advanced decision-making algorithms, ANSPs can manage ATC constraints such as altitude restrictions. This tool automatically identifies and suggests opportunities to relax some of these constraints, which are then proposed to airlines, enabling them to optimise their flight plans, reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
Topics impacting airspace management today
The current geopolitical situation and its impact to our industry is something that needs to be considered in today’s environment when looking at priorities.
Looking at innovation, one area of investment is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the accuracy of sensors. For example, is it a drone or is a bird? Investment in AI is very relevant to decreasing the workload of air traffic controllers (ATCOs) and increasing the C2 defence capabilities by providing the data that matters for them to do their jobs.
Today the airspace for UAVs is still segregated. We need to move beyond this way of working by ensuring safety, security, connectivity and certification. Thales Top Sky AstraUTM is the Thales tool for airspace integration of drones and ultimately advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft. AstraUTM has been used in trials in the US and UAE, supporting more than 20,000 flights in the UAE. Thales is working to define interfaces needed for piloted and un-piloted aircraft to fly together in the same airspace. To do this there is work going on in two lab environments. The Thales SkyLab Network in France and Australia is key to supporting these efforts.
Safety must always come first. You hear a lot of discussion as to whether or not UTM can influence ATM’s pace of innovation and technology adoption and it seems it really comes down to where you sit in the industry, your specific area of focus. Overall it the path is more of an evolution as opposed to a revolution as many might hope.
Technology
AI has already been mentioned above as an area of investment, but it’s already here. It’s being used in systems to accelerate software development, to support decision-making and in sensors and NAVAIDS.
Digitisation has been a topic of discussion for quite a few years in ATM. Cooperation needs to increase between regions, nations and ANSPs. Digitisation = interoperability and as it increases it will become easier for our industry constituents to work as peers. Open platforms with modular functionality reduce the workload of operations organisations to be able to do more. Service-oriented Architectures (SoA) topics were everywhere at this year’s Airspace World, although this discussion has been taking place for quite a few years now, it seems to finally be happening. The reason this has taken so long to take hold is not about the technology itself, but a barrier to adopt new technology in our industry.
Closing our discussion, we touched upon the technologies that are most exciting today. For our industry it came back to AI, but also Quantum computing. But from a personal level, it was about high-gen laser power plants. For readers who don’t know what this is, because honestly I did not until this conversation, at the simplest level it’s about creating nuclear power without nuclear fission, but with nuclear fusion. Potentially a future clean power source. Sounds like a pretty intriguing topic to follow.
